In designing and maintaining data systems, attention has been attached to creating connections between various systems and to their fluent operation. Systems that are separate from each other are often implemented by various methods and different types of hardware which are not compatible. Making various systems compatible has been arduous and time-consuming, if at all possible.
This is why several hardware and system manufacturers have developed a common architecture, CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), with which computer systems of different type and implemented using different programming languages can flexibly communicate with each other. CORBA defines the GIOP protocol (General Inter-ORB Protocol), by means of which hardware of different type and programs programmed with different programming languages can communicate. The GIOP protocol is a common protocol, and on the basis of it, the IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) has been developed especially for the Internet environment. Additional information on CORBA can be found in for instance “The Common Object Request Broker: Architecture and Specification,” Revision 2.0, published by OMG (Object Management Group) that created the architecture. The specification can be found at www.omg.org.
CORBA has been developed for systems which have a fixed connection to each other through a non-specified network. When designing the protocol, attention was not so much attached to the possible capacity of the transmission path as to creating a flexible and safe protocol. Because the proportion of wireless communication has lately been increasing strongly, there has also been a tendency to use data systems and different types of software in computers and apparatuses whose only or primary connection to other networks is over a wireless network, such as the GSM, GPRS or UMTS. The ability of wireless networks to transmit information is considerably lower than that of fixed, wire networks. This is why the application of CORBA in wireless systems has not been wide-spread. Transmitting CORBA over a wireless transmission path has proven to be very slow due to the heavy signalling and the large amount of data to be transmitted.
In software applications in wireless apparatuses, the applications have usually defined their own interfaces and protocols, which have been directly connected to the actual data transmission. FIG. 1 illustrates this. The figure shows three software applications 100 to 104 operating in an apparatus using a wireless connection. Each software has its own protocol 106 to 110, by means of which it is in contact with the transmission layer 112 which manages data transmission using the wireless connection. In this solution, the applications have to be connected to the transmission layer, which makes application development difficult and awkward.